A new survey looks at a rough period at small local papers  Email not displaying correctly?
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(Screenshot, Life at Local Newspapers in a Turbulent Era ([link removed]) )

Four years ago, a survey of small newspapers found optimism in a struggling industry ([link removed]) . Damian Radcliffe intended to conduct that survey again in 2020 to compare the results.

“But then COVID happened.”

The events of 2020, from the pandemic to a new wave of the social justice movement sparked by George Floyd’s death, changed journalism, and it changed the questions Radcliffe and Ryan Wallace asked for the latest survey ([link removed]) , which was published last week by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism.

I asked Radcliffe, a journalism professor at the University of Oregon, what stood out to him about this latest survey, which used responses from 324 people at U.S. newspapers with circulation below 50,000. It struck me that his answers mirror stories my colleagues and I are covering now. They include:

- Journalists report that despite layoffs and furloughs in the pandemic, their working hours hadn’t changed much. “Over a third of respondents (37 percent) work more than 50 hours a week, with half of our sample (50 percent) telling us they work 40 to 50 hours a week,” the study reports.

“I think there was a lot of unpaid labor that we were seeing,” Radcliffe said.

That aligns with a story by my colleague, Angela Fu, that some Gannett journalists report working hundreds of hours of overtime ([link removed]) and NewsGuild is investigating it.

- Only 18% of respondents agreed with this statement: “My news organization is doing a good job with racial diversity.” The Cohort newsletter author Alex Sujong Laughlin just wrote yesterday about the demands young journalists are increasingly unwilling to accept in our industry ([link removed]) . One of them — being the first person in a newsroom who’s not white.

From the report: “Conversations being had at a national level have not always permeated down to local newsrooms. Respondents highlighted lack of resources, buy-in from management, demographics (especially in rural America), and gaps in their own skills and knowledge as potential obstacles to addressing these issues. DEI was typically seen through a racial lens, although other considerations were also discussed.”

- 42% of respondents showed little interest in automation. That surprised Radcliffe because in many small local newsrooms, staff has shrunk while coverage has not. 49% of respondents reported the number of stories they produce has increased in the last three years.

I wrote last week about a project by The Associated Press ([link removed]) to assess the needs of local newsrooms to build out capacity for artificial intelligence and automation that might make room for more in-depth reporting and analysis.

It’s not surprising, after the last 18 months, that the journalists working at small newspapers aren’t too optimistic. But, Radcliffe said, “I do think there is more optimism in there than perhaps some people have seen.”

From the report:

“Despite a challenging financial landscape, coupled with wider issues such as trust in journalism, our 2020 cohort — like their predecessors in 2016 — retained a sense of optimism about the future of their industry. In particular, they highlighted the importance of hyperlocal news, embracing digital and filing information gaps by covering stories not offered elsewhere.”

You can read the full report here ([link removed]) .
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That’s it for me! I had a bunch of “while you’re here” links to share and lost them in a tragic copy/paste incident. I’ll try again next week!

Kristen
Kristen Hare
Editor, Locally
The Poynter Institute
@kristenhare ([link removed])

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